What is the purpose of government? Why should we have a State? What kind of State should we have?
Even within a political community, there may be sharp disagreements about the role and purpose of government. Some want an active, involved government, seeing legal and political institutions as the means to solve our most pressing problems, and to help bring about peace, equality, justice, happiness, and to protect individual liberty. Others want a more minimal government, motivated, perhaps, by some of the disastrous political experiments of the 20th Century, and the thought that political power is often just a step away from tyranny. In many cases, these disagreements arise out of deep philosophical disagreements.
All political and legal institutions are built on foundational ideas. In this course, we will explore those ideas, taking the political institutions and political systems around us not as fixed and unquestionable, but as things to evaluate and, if necessary, to change. We will consider the ideas and arguments of some of the world’s most celebrated philosophers, including historical thinkers such as Plato, Hugo Grotius, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and more contemporary theorists such as Michelle Alexander, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Bryan Caplan, Angela Davis, Ronald Dworkin, Jon Elster, John Hart Ely, H.L.A. Hart, Michael Huemer, Andrew Rehfeld, and Jeremy Waldron.
The aim of the course is not to convince you of the correctness of any particular view or political position, but to provide you with a deeper and more philosophically-informed basis for your own views, and, perhaps, to help you better understand the views of those with whom you disagree.

This unit explores the issues of how our political communities are and should be defined. What is the basis of political community? Should we be allowed to change what political community we are a part of? If so, how easily?

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Alexander Guerrero

Assistant Professor

Текст видео

[MUSIC] Political Community: An Introduction. Hi, welcome back. So far in the course, we've focused on various answers to the question, why should we have a state? Now, we enter into the second half of the course, where we turn our focus from, that set of important questions, to questions that concern more concrete details about the specific state, or specific legal and political institutions, that we might like to see. So in this first unit, we'll raise some basic questions, about something that some see as prior to legal or political institutions, and which others see as a result of our particular legal and political institutions, that is, the political community. So among the questions that we'll consider, what is the appropriate size and basis of political community? Should we be in a political community together because we share a geographic region, a religion, a cultural tradition, a set of values, or even a planet? Should we be allowed to change or to choose what political community we're a part of? If so, how easily? Should we have what are called open borders? What's the value of political community? What's the relationship between community and autonomy, particularly individual autonomy? Who should have a say, in how the community is defined and how the community is governed? So, these are all questions we'll think more about. In this first segment, I want to introduce some of the key theoretical ideas, sort of behind this idea of political community. So, let's begin with the idea of political community, in particular. So we can talk about all kinds of communities. Communities of friends, people who are all friends together. Communities of scholar, so people who all work on similar academic topics. Fans of sports teams can form communities. We have religious communities, linguistic communities, people who all speak a shared language. There's a question, what makes political communities distinct? What makes a community a political community? So, here there's different features that we might identify. Several, I think are particularly important. So, one of the most central, is the idea that political institutions will often, or even always employ, coercion or the threat of coercion, and so this makes them different than other kinds of institutions, other kinds of communities. So we'll need, in particular, greater moral justification than we might need, when we form other kinds of communities. So one way of defining a political community, is just by looking around and seeing who's brought in to the political and legal jurisdiction, of some set of legal or political institutions. So by jurisdiction, I just mean the territory, whether literal physical territory or in some other sense, over which a political system exercises its power. So this would be what we might call, a descriptive way of identifying a political community. The political community consists of all those people who are within the jurisdiction of some particular political system, so that the political system will in fact apply its laws and policies to those people. So this way of thinking about political community, focuses on questions about, who the laws are applied to, focuses on the application of laws to particular individuals. It sort of defines the community that way. But there's additional dimensions we might consider. So a first issue here, is the generality of application questions. So for many political system, some laws will apply to some people. But not to everyone, or not in every instance, so perhaps everyone physically located in a particular jurisdiction has to obey the traffic laws there. But not everyone physically located in that same jurisdiction has to pay income tax, so your physical location isn't enough. And not everyone's governed by the income tax laws of that jurisdiction, so that's a way in which the law might apply for some laws, or the state might apply for, to cover some laws, but not across the board. So there's a question about how to think about political community, in a situation like that. So a second issue might be the way, in which people are subject to the laws. So there might be a political system in which everyone physically located in some area, has to abide by various restrictive laws, limiting what they can do, but in which not everyone located in that area, gets the various benefiting distributive laws, laws that provide that some people will receive various benefits or resources from the political system. So they won't be, all beneficiaries in this sense. So in either case, there might be some disagreement about who counts as a member of the political community. What do we say about people who, only are covered by some of the laws or for whom they only get some of the maybe restrictive application of laws, but not the benefits? Or we might identify distinct political communities within some territory, or even say they are parts of political communities here. So a different way of defining a political community, is less descriptive, less focus on what's actually being done, or who is actually under the jurisdiction of some political system, and instead, asks a related normative question. So, there's a distinction between a descriptive and a normative application question. The descriptive question is this, who is the law in fact, as a matter of actual practice applied to? The normative question is this, who is the law justifiably, or morally appropriately applied to? So we can define political communities either descriptively or normatively. And there are, actually similar distinctions if we shift to a different way of understanding political community. Not in terms of who is subject to the laws, in terms of who the laws are applied to. But in terms of who has a role in creating the laws, or in conferring power to those who create laws. So you might think of political community, not in terms of jurisdictions of application, and jurisdictions of benefit, but also in terms of the foundation of political power. So who has political power? And just as before, we can ask this question either descriptive or normatively. So who in fact has political power? And to what extent and in what form? That'd be one way of thinking about defining the political community, or who ought to have political power? Who in some sense, is entitled to political power in this area. That might be another way of thinking about the political community. As all of this suggests, we might imagine situations in which membership in a political community, is something that comes in degrees. Where how fully one is a member of a political community, is determined by how many of the following boxes, so to speak, one can check off. So here are for example, some of the, some of the descriptive factors we might consider in assessing whether or not some person, is a member of a political community. So these might be different boxes we could look to. So here's one, that all laws of a political system are applied to this person. Or that the person's eligible to receive all benefits, including rights, of the political system. Another one, that the person is required to share all costs of supporting the political system, or that all restrictive laws of the political system apply to this person. Or on the creation side, that the person has some political power in terms of creating the law of the political system, or that the person has as much power, as anyone else in the political system. So these are the descriptive factors we could look to, to see and identify, whether somebody's a part of a political community, and we can imagine there being views in which all of these are required to be sort of a full member of the political community, or in which just some of these, some subset of them are required. And then there'd be normative versions of all of these. That this particular person ought to have, this particular right, or ought to be required to that particular thing. So note that in all of this, sort of abstract discussion, we haven't said very much about how a particular person feels about any of this. So one sense of political community that's pretty natural for people to think about includes, something like self identification, or feelings of allegiance, or loyalty or commitment. Or a shared history in some sense or mutual trust. So a related sense includes something like larger group acceptance of the individual. So are you a member of the political community, well that's something we might have to ask everybody in that community. So we might add all of that in as well, so that a person's a member of a political community, if all of these previous descriptive things are true. And if the person has these attitudes of loyalty and identification with the community. And the group, the rest of the purported community, has these attitudes of inclusion and acceptance toward that person. So these are other kinds of dimensions we could add. And we can offer accounts of the definition of political community that include more or less of these elements. We can refer to these elements sort of broadly as conditions of application of laws. So the ways in which the laws apply to people. Conditions of rights of creation of laws. So whether you have a right or some sense the current power to be a part of creating the laws. Then finally conditions of identification with the political system. Which all of these can be sort of more or less descriptive or more or less normative. So, in the next several segments we'll focus our attention on in general the normative question, of how we should think about the creation and definition of particular political communities. So for most of this, we'll work with something of a hybrid account of political community, where being a member of a political community, includes both normative conditions of application and normative rights of creation. So I'll focus sort of on the application side and the creation side. So one thing I want to stress at the outset, is that these debates about how we should organize and define our political communities are absolutely vital to some of the discussions earlier in the course concerning justice, equality, and freedom. So how political communities come into existence, and how we continue to define them and police their borders, is one of the most urgent questions we face. Particularly in terms of contributing to people's ability to improve their situation, and in terms of the justice, equality, and freedom that we can expect to find within our political communities.